


sing me like a choir

by getbreqed



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Kissing, Post-Canon, Post-Thick as Thieves, Third Person Limited, so far - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 06:08:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15790554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getbreqed/pseuds/getbreqed
Summary: “May I kiss you?” asked Costis, very softly.





	sing me like a choir

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jain/gifts).



> This doesn't quite fit what you asked for in many ways, but it was definitely inspired by your request. I hope you like it anyway!
> 
> edit: oh no I’ve never done this before and I thought that the reveal time was the time fics were due, so someone else pinch hit for this prompt! I guess that’s nice for Jain but I should have done something to figure out the rules better!

Kamet hadn’t drunk very much wine. He’d tipped over a little so that he was leaning on Costis, their shoulders and their knees tangling together instead of careful inches apart, but that was fine. Costis didn’t seem to mind, and he did have all those muscles.

It was nice to have a fire outside. He spent too much time inside hunched over books, even with a window over his desk to catch the sun. The stars were out tonight and he could go back and sleep in his own bed later and his cheeks hurt from laughing. Costis could be very funny in very few words! He was smiling at Kamet just like Kamet was smiling at him.

Eye contact. Costis doesn’t like it when Kamet looks down or away and it made Kamet feel reckless, even then. Costis has nice eyes. Very... Costis. Nice.

Costis reached all the way over with the arm that wasn’t already pressed against Kamet and cupped his hand over his jawbone. Kamet pressed into it towards Costis’ hand and towards the warmth of the fire in the dark. When Costis touched Kamet he did it well. No one had touched Kamet like Costis before, not the bodily hauling but the casual, familiar touches that he was almost used to at this point.

That hadn’t quite felt like a casual touch, though, that was-

Oh-

When they were close enough to be breathing each other’s air, Costis hesitated.

There was a prickly piece of grass against one of Kamet’s ankles. The fire danced and cast light on half of Costis’s face.

“May I kiss you?” asked Costis, very softly.

“Yes.” said Kamet. He said it in Mede first, and then Roa, but by the time he got to Attolian Costis was kissing him so it didn’t really matter.

***

The next morning it was revealed to Kamet that he had drank more wine than was wise by the headache he had before he even got out of bed. There was also some nebulous panic at the night’s previous events, when Costis had taken him up onto one of the closer hills with a wineskin to see the stars and kissed him, then helped him down into his own bed. He could avoid that panic becoming concrete by concentrating on his headache.

The world was bright, which was not ideal. He managed to sit up and drink the cup of water Costis must have left beside his bed and make his way out to the front room.

Costis was still there, which he hadn’t expected. When Costis left to wander around in the mountains he usually left before dawn, small gossip for the early rising baker and no one else. He was sitting working on a letter to his king at the table rather than the small desk by the window, half finished breakfast pushed to the side. He glanced up from his careful work to look at Kamet, smile turned rueful by the line between Kamet’s eyebrows.

“Rough night?” he asked.

Kamet grimaced, and then smiled automatically back at Costis, and then sat down to eat breakfast.

Thankfully he saw no need for further conversation. Kamet ate his breakfast and Costis finished his in peace. Sometimes Costis looked up to smile at him. Kamet smiled back and concentrated on his headache and eating his breakfast.

When Costis finished, he checked everything in his pack and went to the door. Kamet followed, unsure what the protocol for a morning exit was instead of a dawn one.

Costis stopped suddenly before opening the door and turned to face Kamet. Kamet was standing… too close. Before he could step away, Costis again reached up to cup Kamet’s face with his hand. His thumb ran over Kamet’s lower lip and back again.

“May I kiss you?” he asked again, very softly. Kamet could hear distant sounds of the town outside the door. Costis looked hopeful, maybe a bit guarded -

“Yes,” said Kamet, in Attolian first this time, and Costis leaned down and kissed him. He couldn’t blame any of the warmth in his stomach on wine. When Costis pulled back and smiled at him Kamet felt like the most wonderful person in the world.

“Goodbye, Kamet,” said Costis, still with his hand on the side of Kamet’s face.

“Goodbye, Costis,” Kamet said. Then Costis slipped out the door and went to explore the hills in the area away from the river.

***

Kamet thought about Nahuseresh.

Kay the Scribe had friends and acquaintances in town and among the other scribes, but Kamet avoided them all that day. He had a desk in the temple from which to copy the scrolls, and he had managed to find one that was inconveniently small to other scribes and tucked away near a window that overlooked the sea. It was a beautiful day and Costis was probably making good time towards places he hadn’t mapped out yet.

He found himself mesmerised by the light from the window on the floor of the room.

When Nahuseresh was displeased, he had beat Kamet and thrown things at him, called him all sorts of names. After he was done being angry, he liked to call Kamet back to him and in dressing his wounds press on all the places that had been hurt until the bandaging was almost worse than the initial beating. It meant he had paid the price for whatever transgression he had committed, which he had liked. Being in Nahuseresh’s good graces meant everything to him when he would have nothing without him.

But he had never cried because he thought Nahuseresh didn’t like him. Nahuseresh was just how the world worked. Keep Nahuseresh happy and someday he’d go on to better things, to serve the emperor, to do all sorts of things happily without Nahuseresh.

Why had Costis kissed him? Why had he asked if he could?

Kamet had been in love with Marin once, his master’s favorite dancing girl. He’d planned to run away with her. They had stolen some moments together, always sweet and fleeting, until they were found out.

Does he tell you how much he loves you? Does he tell you how pretty you are? Those were Godekker’s words. When he tires of you, they will sell you on to some new master.

Costis had called them together Immakuk and Ennikar.

***

By noon he had barely read a word of what he was supposed to be translating, and he didn’t think that sitting there for any longer would help. He did stop by and talk to some of the lazier apprentices who had made a game of identifying ships that passed by below. The boy who was the official scorekeeper seemed encouraged by Kay the Scribe’s interest in their game, and it was pleasant to see him sit straighter to read out the ships they had spotted today and which apprentice had seen them first.

He left the temple and walked down the hill towards the little town in the valley. He could go back to their house to get some of the stew they had leftover from yesterday’s supper, but he decided to walk to the bakery instead to get some fresh bread.

“I didn’t see your Attolian go by this morning,” the baker said when Kamet got to the counter. “Did you two have a late night out on the hill?”

She was obviously fishing for gossip, maybe annoyed she hadn’t been the only one to see Kamet’s Attolian go by in the morning. Kamet held his head and groaned theatrically, made some excuse about wine, and left with a piece of bread and a conspiratorial wink. 

Wandering around the small town, Kamet couldn’t help but notice that there wasn’t a place there that didn’t make him think of Costis. He had walked these streets with Costis and had them explained to him with a soldier’s eye, Costis leaning close to speak softly in his ear. Any unusual plant on the side of the road made him wonder if his Attolian, at first an indifferent naturalist, had taken them to the herb woman in town to ask its properties and uses, or sent it off to the magus in Sounis to ask its relation to other plants he’d studied. Kamet was even starting to recognize some of them.

He reached the edge of town and turned back to head to their house. He got all the way there thinking pleasant thoughts about Costis before realizing that Costis had run away -for “at least a week” - to avoid the conversation that would lay to rest the feelings that were slowly congealing in his mind, much as he tried to ignore them.

One of the benefits of speaking five languages is was how satisfying it was to curse in them. One of the benefits of being a freedman was that when you cursed your Attolian’s parentage in five languages in front of your house in the middle of the day, it reflected badly on no one but yourself.

***

When Costis walked back through the door of their house, Kamet was already home from the temple and was looking over their finances in the little desk in the kitchen. 

Kamet stood up and as soon as the door shut behind Costis and he started to take off his pack, heavy with all sorts of weeds, Kamet asked, “Are you in love with me?”

He sounded incredulous and demanding even to his own ears. Costis stopped what he was doing and looked at Kamet. His face started to turn red.

“Um. Maybe?” he said. 

That was not what Kamet had been expecting. He waved his hands in the air, almost yelling now. “How can the answer to that question be a maybe! You either are are you aren’t!”

“I don’t know! I’ve never been in love before!” Costis dropped his bag to the floor with a heavy thump, surely crushing some of the greenery attached to the outside of it, and strode over to hold Kamet’s hands and keep him from hitting anything, even though there was really nothing close by for him to hit.

They were standing very close then. “Are you in love with me?” Costis asked, and there, that was the panicked thought he’d managed to avoid thinking about for the entire week previous.

“I- I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe?”

His Attolian doesn’t laugh, but Costis’ silences can be very eloquent.

“You don’t get to stand there all... like that when you avoided this conversation by running away for a week! In a story you’d be a- a faithless lover.” Kamet’s pretty sure that he’s flushing too now, somehow tripping into calling Costis his lover.

“Well then I’m sorry for leaving you here all by yourself,” Costis says before the amusement slips from his expression. His fingers tighten and then relax over Kamet’s hands.

“Kamet, do you think that you could be in love with me? Or fall in love with me. Either one.” The Attolian’s face always showed everything he felt. Kamet almost wanted to turn away from the intimacy of his careful hope but at the same time he wanted to look at nothing else.

“Yes,” Kamet answered. “Yes, I think I might.”

And then Costis was smiling at him like Kamet was the most wonderful person in the world and Kamet was pretty sure he was smiling at his Attolian the same way.

“So,” asked Kamet. “You’re maybe in love with me?”

“Yes?” Costis answered.

Kamet took his hand out from Costis’s and reached up to cup the side of his face. He may have gone up on his toes.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

Costis said “yes” as he leaned down.

And Kamet kissed him.


End file.
